A Man of the Old School
Louis Begley's work is like
a bibliographer's idea of nostalgia: Everything has been downhill since the
first book. Begley's first novel, Wartime Lies , was a work of great
distinction. Three novels later, it is still his best, a marvel of achieved
restraint. Unhappily, the subsequent novels have been unwitting examples of the
difficulty of writing about restraint as a subject. About Schmidt , his
new book which explores the dwindling years of a morose retired lawyer, a man
who calls himself "the last of the Wasps," offers some of his most delicate
writing yet, but once again involves Begley in the paradoxical task of giving
expression to repression.
Wartime Lies, which is largely autobiographical, recounts the adventures
of Maciek, a Jewish boy who, with his aunt Tania, is fleeing the Nazis in
Poland. The pair do not look Jewish, and this, combined with Tania's charm,
enables them to evade capture, even as they live openly yards from the Warsaw
ghetto. Nonetheless, they are in great peril, and are hiding from that peril.
By contrast, Begley's second novel, The Man Who Was Late , is about a man
who is hiding a secret. Ben is a successful American financier who has
repressed the memory of his unhappy Jewish childhood. What mysteriously
disappeared, from one book to the next, is a sense of the perilous. It is as if
Begley could no longer identify the enemy. In this novel and his third, As
Max Saw It , his characters are still hiding, but now they are hiding from
themselves. It is this self-division that seems to defy lucid expression. The
secrecy is more opaque than it appears to warrant.
A>bout Schmidt is a better book than its two
predecessors, partly because of the honesty of Albert Schmidt's
self-disclosures. There is clarity here; he hides nothing from us. Publicly, he
maintains the Wasp proprieties--a stiff upper lip, a stiff drink, the rattle of
small talk. But privately, his soul is in turmoil. Essentially, Schmidt
narrates this novel (the third-person narrator hews closely to his point of
view); in the process, he uncovers his own hurts. His only daughter, Charlotte,
is marrying one of his former junior partners from the old law firm, Jon Riker.
Schmidt thinks him dull and laborious and, with the kind of bigotry that is the
fermentation of social vintage, disapproves of his Jewishness. Schmidt is also
still in mourning for his wife. His daughter seems to be cleaving to the Riker
family rather than to her sad father. He kicks old memories around his lovely
house in Bridgehampton--a house that he tries to give to Charlotte and Jon, but
that they ungraciously refuse. At 60, his body is cooling, and even the heat of
an affair with a dangerously young waitress at a local restaurant will not warm
him for long.
What is
fine here is the precision of Begley's attention; he does not strive to make
Schmidt either likable or a monster. He paints with care the natural
variegation of Schmidt's petty anti-Semitism, its defiance on top, its
embarrassment under-leaf: "To the best of his recollection, no matter how
deeply or how far back he looked, Schmidt was sure he had not once in his life
stood in the way of any Jew." Schmidt's codes of belonging, his fastidious
prejudices, are laid bare. In sentences of loping, baroque syntax, Begley makes
his elegant, stately report. There is something impressive about a writer so
undaunted by a character's trivial unpleasantness, by his daily acts of
meanness.
But About Schmidt loses delicacy as it
proceeds. Its power flows from its fidelity to Schmidt's unhappiness, and this
unhappiness has a reality only because we see how self-invented it is.
Schmidt's selfishness is the most convincing element of this portrait. But then
Begley cheats; he weights our sympathy in Schmidt's favor. His daughter becomes
not merely ungrateful but implausibly hostile. In a climactic scene, she
telephones Schmidt to tell him that a rabbi will be performing the wedding
service, and that she will be converting. "There must be more to being a Jew
than your kind of Episcopalian," she sneers. Since she has not, until this
moment, shown interest one way or another in her inherited religion, her sudden
zeal to abandon it seems clumsy on Begley's part. Meanwhile, her fiancé, who is
interestingly dull at the beginning of the book, begins to curdle into
uninteresting stereotype--the dry, ruthless Jewish lawyer poised to strip the
in-law of his treasures. He is abetted by his beautiful psychoanalyst mother,
Renata, who is also crudely drawn: Like some caricature of a Freudian, she has
an urge to psychoanalyze Schmidt whenever he is in her presence. Schmidt quotes
from King Lear , and Begley intends a soft echo of that play in his tale
of an aged patriarch quarreling with a daughter. But what's interesting about
King Lear is that Lear has no reason to blame his daughters: Their
villainy is all in his head. The obviousness of Charlotte and Jon's evil
leaches the force from the story. Begley wants us to feel pity for a man
already swimming in the emotion.
As Begley loses his critical
distance from Schmidt, the novel grows maudlin and bleary. Clannishly, Begley
offers Schmidt sexual release. He romps with Renata, and then with a
20-year-old waitress named Carrie, who is so eager to have sex with a man 40
years her senior that she begs for it. The Jamesian upholstery is ripped off
Begley's prose, and we are down to springs and horsehair: "I haven't seen your
breasts. I think they are small and hard," Schmidt muses. "You're wrong. I've
got big tits," she replies. Then Schmidt retreats from us, lost in a cloth that
Begley throws over him, and what began as a sharp examination of public
restraint and private release dwindles into a self-pity which seems not merely
Schmidt's, but Begley's.
Repression is one of
Begley's main themes. But his latest novels do more than just showcase it; they
become its victims. It is difficult not to detect an autobiographical note in
his heroes' struggle to control inner distress and bury forgotten memories.
Even Wartime Lies , apparently so different from Begley's later work, is
introduced by a man who "has no childhood that he can bear to remember." In the
last 100 pages of this novel, Schmidt's struggle to control himself fades from
view, and one suspects that it is a struggle Begley can no longer depict,
because it is a struggle he can no longer win. Instead, he shuts it down, and
Schmidt dissolves into Begley's anxious obscurity.
